by Daniel Greenfield
Hamas shoots off thousands of rockets. It doesn't matter how many actually work or how many take out its own people.
Terrorists use their own people as weapons and as human shields. If they don't die, they win. If they die, they also win. So every conflict is a win-win scenario.
Hamas doesn't need good and accurate targeting. It needs scale. So it has some higher-end rockets that it's testing for Iran, and then it deploys cheap and dirty weapons on a large scale. It shoots off thousands of rockets. It doesn't matter how many actually work or how many take out its own people.
If its people die, even by its own hand, they're still going to show up as victims of Israel on the front page of the New York Times.
And so Israel pursues increasingly careful and accurate targeting while Hamas goes the other way because being less accurate and using worse equipment actually helps its cause.
How many of the Arab Muslims who are described as "Palestinians" killed in the latest Hamas war on Israel died of their own rockets?
A BESA Center estimate places it at 36%.
There is direct evidence that some of these Palestinian deaths were caused by errant Palestinian rockets and mortars that fell in Gaza rather than in Israel. The NGO Defense for Children International-Palestine (an extremely anti-Israel organization) tweeted on May 11 that on the previous day, a Palestinian rocket landed in Jabalya in northern Gaza that killed eight Palestinians, including two children.
In another tweet, the same organization noted an explosion, also on May 10, in Beit Hanoun in which six Palestinian children and two adults were killed, though it could not confirm the cause. According to ITIC, those deaths too were caused by a Palestinian rocket that went astray.
That 16 Palestinians, including eight children, were killed in just one day by two errant Palestinian rockets underscores just how dangerous these projectiles are. Considering that 680 Palestinian rockets and mortars landed inside Gaza during the 11 days of fighting, this one-day toll suggests that a significant number of Gaza residents were killed by those weapons.
Because we'll never know the truth, this is just an estimate.
Over the first three days of the 2006 conflict, 367 rockets landed in Israel, causing four deaths. This gives an RPF (rockets per fatality) of 367/4, or almost 92.
In the recent conflict with Gaza, Israel did have Iron Dome, but we can correct for that and determine the effect of civil defense alone by estimating how many Israelis would have been killed by rockets had Iron Dome not been present. Because Iron Dome shot down 1,450 threatening rockets but missed 160, and nine people were killed, the number who would likely have been killed without Iron Dome is approximately 9 × (1,450+160)/160, or about 91.
We can thus determine that the RPF without Iron Dome would have been 3,573/91, or about 39.
That's a reminder of the kind of casualties that the Squad and other Democrat opponents of Iron Dome would like to see happen.
The estimate arrived at is 91, amounting to 36% of the alleged Palestinian death toll.
Or a third.
Daniel Greenfield
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/third-palestinian-casualties-caused-hamas-rockets-daniel-greenfield/
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